100 best albums of 2013 countdown: 70-61

We listened to a buttload of albums this year and conferred varying degrees of merit, in quail form, upon them based on our own spurious criteria…

…and now we bring you our favourite hundred of them, counted down in order arbitrarily/for fun. Now, let’s have a look at positions 70 to 61…

70. Gary Numan – Splinter (Songs from a Broken Mind)

What we said…

Numan remains in touch with everything that ever made him great: dark, raging blasts of synth, mean fuzz bass and architecturally piled-up elements, all expertly deployed within a quiet/loud dynamic that drives creeping wilderness into explosions of electronic drama.

69. Oneohtrix Point Never – R Plus Seven

What we said…

Daniel Lopatin has woven together a patchwork of disparate ideas somehow stitched together with sudden movements and tangents; it’s kind of avant-garde, as long as prefacing the term ‘avant-garde’ with ‘kind of’ doesn’t puncture the notion completely.

68. Nightmares on Wax – Feelin’ Good

What we said…

Feelin’ Good will leave you feeling as much with its laid-back stoner funk, sweet applications of organic orchestration, its warmth-dispensingly plonking bass lines and all-round sense of the luxurious, the exotic and the luxuriously exotic. Oh, and the exotically luxurious.

67. Jagwar Ma – Howlin

What we said…

Sounds like compatriots Tame Impala by way Liars’ WIXIW album of last year, all shot through with a strong dose of Screamadelicalicious acid house. That is to say it’s a fizzing, rattling club night deferring to a set of instantly winning melodies and harmonies.

66. Men Among Animals – Buried Handsome

What we said…

Utterly sublime, euphoric pop smothered in luscious harmonies, drenched in sunny good vibes and home to some gloriously wibbly weird sounds… Experimental pop music is alive and well and has family in Denmark.

65. Grumbling Fur – Glynnaestra

What we said…

Willing to try almost anything, safe perhaps in the knowledge that they invariably – nay, always – come out smelling of roses… A masterful convergence of electronic and organic, dripping with lysergic goodness,

64. Spider 72 – Seven.

What we said…

High quality psych-pop that’s not too in thrall to the psych to forget the pop, showing also a clear shoegaze influence… Simon Berry’s talents may be fuzzy and a little eccentric, but that’s all the more reason to take them very seriously indeed.

62. Darwin Deez – Songs For Imaginative People

What we said…

Smart, playful and thoroughly delightful odd-pop, although its near-total absence of attention span is bound to rub up the wrong way those who see ‘focus’ and whatnot as being necessary to making a good album.